29 March 2008 8:34 PM

This week we have a rare glimpse of the true agenda of our new, modernised rulers. They have disclosed their secret, virulent loathing of fatherhood.

They wish to abolish independent, free families headed by husbands, and have us all dependent on the nosy-parker state.

They pretend to be pro-family. But, very occasionally, they have to admit what they are really doing, so as to slip it through Parliament or the civil service. It's always in some tiny sub-clause.

For instance, a little-read November 2003 document led to a ban on the mention of marriage on government forms. Effectively this ended any official recognition of the status of 'husband' or 'wife', a change partly to blame for the tragic collapse in the number of marriages revealed this week.

Now we have the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, only seven years after the last one on this subject. Before that, in a 1990 Act, Parliament still dared to say that a child needed a father.

It declared: "A woman shall not be provided with treatment services unless account has been taken of the welfare of any child who may be born as a result of the treatment (including the need of that child for a father)."

But now the words 'a father' will be replaced by 'supportive parenting'. Next, what the law said as recently as 1990 will be unsayable in a public place. Opponents of this change will, as usual, be falsely smeared as bigots.

In fact, the change - never openly argued for by its supporters - is a revolutionary blow at the foundations of British society. It is driven by the thinking of a few Marxist weirdos, including Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse.

Their wild and twisted ideas were popular among students 40 years ago, when our present generation of MPs, broadcasters and civil servants were lazing on the lawns of their universities. Once before, these people let their cat out of the bag for a swift, frightening moment.

Still to be found in the archives of The Times for February 1980 is a letter from Helen Brook, who spent much of her life obsessively pressing contraceptives first on unmarried women, then on schoolchildren. The triumph of her creepy beliefs has brought about a pandemic of unwanted pregnancies and abortions,the very things she claimed to be preventing.

She let her real aim be known when she wagged her finger warningly at those who dared get in her way, hissing: 'From birth till death it is now the privilege of the parental State to take major decisions - objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child.' She knew power was on her side.

When, back in 1967, she offered contraceptive 'help' to under-age girls - behind the backs of their parents and their GPs - most normal people viewed her actions as shocking. In 1995 (under a Tory government, of course) she got the CBE. Now her view is the law of the land.

And it is clearer every day that, as the family grows weaker, the parental State is coldly weighing up what is best for us all, with its armoury of identity cards, DNA databases, fingerprints, CCTV cameras and interfering social workers.

We have more or less banned smacking, so tender are we, but have created a feral society swirling with gun and knife crime (and, of course, boot crime, which is just as dangerous if you get your head kicked as if it were a football). And it can only be controlled by a authoritarian state.

We have got rid of fathers, and will soon make them illegal. And instead we shall have Big Brother.

How can he sleep, let alone hug a bunny?

Here is a recent picture of the President of the United States, author and begetter of the Iraq invasion, which last week brought that devastated country close to its second civil war in five years.

It's amazing the man can sleep, let alone cuddle giant bunnies.

Still, I suppose it's less embarrassing than that other snap of him, under the banner saying 'Mission Accomplished'.

Nothing works, because no one learns anything

Well, of course Heathrow Airport's new terminal opened amid confusion, incompetence and bungle.

Nothing in this country works properly any more. Why should we expect it to?

If you trash your education system in around 1968, as we did when we went comprehensive, the full effects will be showing within 40 years, as the people who know what they are doing die and retire, and are replaced by people who don't.

What is the point of a school?

As far as the Government is concerned, it is to create as much equality as possible, with education a very poor second.

How else can you explain the new plan to force schools to take in a fresh disruptive troublemaker for every one they expel?

The official reason for this, "to stop a minority of top-performing schools excluding the most unruly pupils to boost their position", appears to have been devised in either Broadmoor or Rampton.

Sarkozy, a jet-setter on the wrong track

Why didn't President Sarkozy come on his state visit by train?

There's a very good and very fast train service from Paris to London.

Our career politicians of all parties hate trains and railways, and have been trying for years to destroy them.

They still seem to think there's something clever or modern about flying, probably because they never have to travel on an ordinary scheduled flight.

But I thought it was different in France.

__________________________________That fascinating development, the new love affair between the Left-liberal BBC and the Left-liberal Tory Party, continues, as BBC news programmes ceaselessly plug various flaccid Tory initiatives which they would until recently have hurled into the nearest bin.

How has it been done? Thanks to my colleague Miles Goslett, who put in a Freedom of Information request, the lid has been partly lifted.

The BBC Director-General, Mark Thompson, together with a couple of his top commissars, went to pay court to David Cameron at his office on February 28.

Since everyone involved was paid out of public money, I think we should be told what they discussed.

__________________________________

Reviewers are surprised that Leftie playwright Howard Brenton has written a play portraying Harold Macmillan as a good guy.

Why the shock? Macmillan, like most of the Tory Party since about 1945, was a socialist in all but name.__________________________________

The Government is right about one thing.

We must build, now, as many nuclear power stations as we possibly can, or spend the 2020s undergoing endless blackouts.

For once, the green fanatics are divided onthis. Seize the opportunity. It will not come again.

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25 March 2008 6:46 PM

You might think this was an easy question - as easy as how to decide between your conscience and Gordon Brown's views on medical research (I'll touch on that later). But it's not. As with so much of modern Britain, a moment's thought will tell you that things are not as they seem. But few are prepared to think about it, which is why we do nothing to change things for the better.

The official idea is that MPs are elected, by us, to serve us, and represent us in Parliament. Virtually none of this is true. In almost all cases, MPs are selected, not elected. They are picked as candidates for safe (or at least winnable) seats, owned by one or other of the national tribal parties. The actual hiring is done long before any public election, by small cliques of party activists in one of the established political organisations.

Even these small cliques, which never amount to more than a large roomful of people, are manipulated by still smaller groups - and the safer the seat, the harder such groups are to penetrate or influence. In the blunt old days of machine politics, people who tried to join the Labour Party in its heartland areas were often told that it was "full up".

This was not as silly as it sounds. Labour did not need - and the modern parties do not need - politically committed and interested people hanging around trying to change things. So please go away. Interestingly, the Tories have recently taken to having 'open primaries' in some seats, where non-Tories ( and members of rival parties) are encouraged to turn up. This seems to have had the effect of neutralising any traditional conservatives in these local parties, and aiding bland, Cameroon types.

Of course, if you wish to stand for the Tory interest in the Welsh Valleys, or as a Labour candidate in the Cotswolds, you may find it a lot easier to be selected whatever your views. But since you have no chance of becoming an MP, so what? Even these selections tend to be dominated by hopeful professional politicians, having a harmless practice run, but also being careful to avoid saying anything original or interesting, in case it comes back to haunt them when the winnable seat comes their way. .

This means that, the moment the newly-elected MP turns up at Westminster, he knows that he must please his party above all things. Because - especially nowadays - the parties are hugely centralised. Local organisations have little independence and cannot match the huge funds which the headquarters spend. Labour became very skilled at asserting its control - inserting its favourites into safe seats - during the Blair years.the Tories have recently caught up.

The indefensible sacking of the MP Howard Flight for speaking his mind at a private meeting, back in March 2005, marked the end of any pretence that Tory constituency associations have any real independence. Michael Howard simply used his power as leader to compel the local Tories to accept Flight's dismissal. Once this happened, the voters of Arundel obediently installed the substitute Tory candidate, presumably following the Alsatian principle ("If they put up an Alsatian round here with a red/blue rosette on, it would get elected").

The supposed rebellion, in which Martin Bell replaced Neil Hamilton as MP for Tatton, was also not what it seemed. The Labour and Liberal-Democrat Parties (no doubt with approval of their central HQs) withdrew their candidates. Had they not done so, It is unlikely that Mr Bell could have won. When Mr Bell began to voice criticism of New Labour, he very rapidly felt the vindictive venom of the party machine - and it would be interesting to know what would have happened if he had decided to break his pledge and try to stay on for a second parliament. His subsequent efforts to get elected have flopped, despite his TV celebrity and undoubted integrity, which in my view proves definitively that his 'breakthrough' was the work of the parties, not a personal triumph.

Even the rebellions, you see, are controlled by the party machines. Real rebellions, such as Mr Flight daring to differ with his leader on economic policy, are steamrollered until they are quite flat.

This is the reason for the growing treatment of MPs as employees. But whose employees are they? Officially, they are employed by Parliament itself, which provides them with a salary and perks, as we now know in some detail. But who really decides what these rewards shall be?

I would say ( and this is why the current arrangements are so scandalous) that the MPs, the party whips and the party machines collude together, to arrive at a deal which gives MPs a great deal more than the public thinks they have, or wants them to have - and which is their just as long as they behave. There are of course MPs of integrity,who do not mil this system for all ti is worth. And there are outrageous greedy people, who take everything they can . And in between is the great mass of MPs, who are more or less compromised by the benefits of the 'job', and who fear the wrath of the whips , which can snatch away these delights at the first sign of real dissent.

Those who have decided to pursue the political career to the next stage - ministerial rank - are as a result even more vulnerable. Huge salaries and pensions, by the standards of most people, will only continue if they behave. And that doesn't just mean performing with reasonable competence and safety in their ministerial task. It means not rocking the boat on other matters.

It means staying within the 'centre' - the rather narrow band of acceptable political views which the elite allows to be expressed and pursued, and which have succeeded in nearly ruining a once-prosperous, free and ordered society in a matter of less than 50 years.But we all know that.

Now we are approaching the final stage of the slow-motion coup d'etat by which the left have destroyed or hollowed out all the institutions which protected Britain from them. Plans have been leaked to turn the House of Lords, already largely gutted, into a 'Senate' of 'elected' Party placemen. Like almost every new chamber set up by New Labour, this 'Senate' will not even have the small safeguard of direct election in a constituency, which can at least sometimes lead to the ejection of an outright scoundrel by popular will. The 'lost system', under which the parties prepare a list of their servants, and the public vote merely decides how many of these characters go on the public payroll, is to be used.

Once it has begun its sessions, we will be able to compare this 'Senate' with the pre-1997 House of Lords. And it will be obvious even to the dimmest that it is less free, less independent, less unpredictable, more controlled, more subservient.

The old House of Lords was imperfect - its members should have rebelled more than they did against Tory governments, though they rebelled against them more often than they are given credit for. But that wholly unelected, undemocratic chamber was much more effective in obstructing bad laws and foolish governments than the democratic and elected Commons. It also managed a far higher standard of debate. And this was precisely because it was undemocratic and unelected. Democracy, especially in the days of TV, picks pliable mediocrities.

That is why the House of Lords is being suppressed, because it was independent and thoughtful, and contributed to our freedom. This undeniable fact was a worrying contradiction of the orthodox egalitarian view..

And if we ever get an elected government with seriously authoritarian tendencies, the new 'Senate', made up of centre-ground party apparatus men and women, will be far more likely to allow (and the House of Lords still has this power, so presumably the Senate' will inherit it) the postponement of a general election, if that is what the government wants. Mind you, there is now so much dangerous legislation, especially the terrifying Civil Contingencies Act, that this may not be necessary to establish a new strong state.

There should not need to be a moment's discussion about the conflict between party whips and individual consciences. An MP, or peer, who tramples on his conscience on the orders of the state, should not be allowed to be an MP or a Peer Or a 'senator'). And a ridiculous compromise, which allows MPs to follow their consciences, provided not enough of them do it to defeat the government, is almost physically nauseating.

I am most repelled by the clause in the Fertilisation Bill which officially dispenses with the idea that a father is necessary to the upbringing of a child. The other objections, though obviously strong and valid, are so much in the realm of the laboratory that they do not at first sight seem so outrageous as mass abortion.

Even so, they are outrageous, and I wonder what it is that makes the government so anxious to permit them. The claims that such experiments will bring cures for dreaded diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's seems to me to be based on nothing. What if you do all these horrid, creepy things and there is no cure? And even if you did, would it justify such an obvious breach of clear boundaries?

I think the scientists who invented the A-bomb knew that what they were doing was wrong, and yet they did it, using the defeat of Hitler as their justification.

22 March 2008 10:06 PM

Year by year we throw away the beliefs that underpin our society. We have no idea how dangerous this path is, nor how steeply it descends into the darkness.

This is the first generation in centuries that could not see why it is wrong to allow betting shops to open on Good Friday.

And that is because this is the first generation in centuries that does not know that the soldiers cast lots at the foot of the Cross, ignoring the groans of the crucified Jesus and the weeping of his mother, to decide which of them should have Christ's seamless garment.

To anyone who understands what Good Friday means, the placing of bets on this day is a sort of obscenity. To everyone else it is a bit of fun or good business.

Well, do you think we won't pay for this? We are paying for it.

Look at the paintings of the Crucifixion by the great Flemish Masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and you will see, baying or sneering at Golgotha, exactly the same snarling, contorted, heedless faces you find on the drunken streets of our country.

These artists were trying to tell us that, if we reject the idea of absolute unchanging goodness, we will become like that mob, and part of it.

And we are doing so, visibly.

For the first and most important victim of Britain's braying, self-reliant Godlessness is lifelong marriage, that often hard and inconvenient arrangement that rests, in the end, on self-sacrifice, patience, constancy and restraint – virtues that a materialist credit-card society scorns and which die when religion dies.

Those that have ears to hear should listen to the sober truth spoken by a teacher, Phil Whalley, at the conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

He said that 40 to 50 per cent of youngsters born in Britain this year face a greater risk of failing at school because they will be born to unmarried couples or single parents.

Mr Whalley said: 'We all know from professional experience ...that no matter how brilliant the lesson, or how much has been spent on rebuilding the school, if children come in angry and in emotional turmoil because of their family life, they will not learn.

"The great sadness is that the consequences of an unstable family background are felt long into adult life.

"Those who underachieve in their education are more likely to go on and live dysfunctional lives and be unable to support a stable family life for their own children. In short, as a society we are in danger of creating an expanding, perpetuating and toxic circle."

This is actually what people such as me have been warning of for years, while being dismissed loftily as puritans and bigots and falsely described as believers in a past "golden age".

It is now coming true in the schools and – ever more rapidly – on the streets as well.

And still nobody proposes to do anything about it, because nobody in high politics, culture or the education industry is prepared to say that some things are right and some things are wrong – unconditionally and always.

It is easier, as it was that first Easter, to wash their hands of it.

Too rich to care, the party 'tart' who should know better

Many people are quite reasonably alarmed by the way of life embraced by the "family" of Shannon Matthews, and subsidised by you and me in a spasm of misplaced and counter-productive "compassion".

As well they might be.

This is modern Britain and it will soon be coming to a location near you, if it hasn't already.

But we shouldn't think the middle classes are blameless.

Look at the famous party in Bovey Tracey, Devon, which went wrong, ending with a virtual riot and the trashing and ransacking by ferals of the family's lovely house.

Sarah Ruscoe attends a girls-only grammar school in the supposedly staid South West and obviously has all the benefits of education and money.

Yet nobody seems to have thought it abnormal to hire bouncers for her 18th birthday celebration, or for her to dress as a kinky tart for the occasion.

Too rich to care, still infected by the drivel of Sixties ideas on sex, drugs and selfishness, the very people who ought to be setting standards are busily smashing them up. If you break the rules to suit yourself, you may get away with it because you are well-off.

But you will not like it when your attitudes are adopted by the poor inhabitants of housing estates, who reasonably decide that if it's all right for people who live in manor houses, it's all right for them, too.

The warmongers who go on lying

Please don't believe the Iraq War apologists when they claim it would have been all right if only it had been better planned.

This is an excuse invented after the event for a wrong, stupid and dishonest war which we should never have taken part in and which has played a large part in the economic tornado in which we now shiver.

I have checked my own writings from the months before the war, and it was quite obvious to me – with no special access to intelligence information – that our leaders were lying and had no idea what they were doing.

This applies to the leadership and the back benches of both the main political parties, with a very few honourable exceptions.

Only the Liberal Democrats, now the targetsof a sustained campaign of vilification by the Cameron-loving media pack, emerged with any honour.

In any other field of endeavour those responsible for such a terrible, bloody failure would long have been driven from public life.

Yet they are still here, claiming some right to govern us. Why?

Who has faith in this archbishop?

Now Anglican Canon Michael Ainsworth has been beaten up outside his church by youths snarling "You ****ing priest", will the Archbishop of Canterbury tear himself away from his Koran and issue a ringing denunciation of Christianophobia? No, thought not.

The simpering chorus of Barack Obama admirers praise the strange speech he gave, defending his links with the Left-wing pastor Jeremiah Wright. The US media have finally spotted that Wright, a serious weirdo, is a liability. Mr Obama refused to disown Wright, saying: "I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother." Hang on. Of course he can't disown his granny. You can't choose your granny – and as it happens she did much of the hard work of bringing him up. But he chose Jeremiah Wright and his church. He could disown him if he wanted to. He just doesn't want to. When will people see through this fake?

Will anything be done about the wretched postal ballot system, which is an invitation to fraud. What do you think? After the conviction of a Useless Tory councillor for voting fraud, Judge Richard Mawrey QC said vote-rigging was "childishly simple to commit and very difficult to detect". Back in 2005 the same excellent judge said some ballots in this country would disgrace a banana republic (which of course we now are). So why is it that the major political parties don't immediately tighten the law?

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18 March 2008 6:07 PM

It is truly said that, if you wait long enough, you see everything. And I think we shall, sooner or later, see Western governments talking more or less directly to the political front-men of Islamist terror.

In many ways, they already do so indirectly. How else can you describe the Anthony Zinni and Colin Powell missions to Yasser Arafat immediately after the 11th September massacres, which were greeted with joy by many Palestinian Arabs? Or The White House's decision to endorse the idea of a 'Palestinian State', which it had previously rejected?

They knew, though it is invariably officially denied, that the 11th September was mainly about ending US support for Israel, despite all the official flannel about how it is all about the alleged fact that Islamists 'hate our way of life' and will not rest until they have extirpated it.

It's also perfectly obvious that British commanders have talked to the Taliban in Afghanistan, though of course we officially pretend that the tribal leaders we meet in Helmand are not the Taliban.

And it's undeniable that the Americans have talked to, and bribed, many of their opponents in Iraq, some of whom trade under the brand, or perhaps it is a franchise, loosely known as 'Al Qaeda' .

But direct, explicit contact is still viewed with a gasp of maidenly horror and an urgent rustle of gathered official petticoats.

After all, if we are prepared to bargain with these people, ever, then how can we justify all the panicky palaver of the 'War on Terror', the prison camps, the waterboarding, the 'security measures', the airport striptease comedy imposed on innocent passengers?

And how will the rhetoric about "evil" , and "you can run but you can't hide" look, when that handshake finally happens? Very silly, that is how it will look. In fact, it's how it looks to me now.

Now Jonathan Powell, Anthony Blair's former henchman, has confirmed my suspicions with some astonishing remarks made to the 'Guardian' published last Saturday.

He began by saying : "There's nothing to say to al-Qaeda and they've got nothing to say to us at the moment, but....." (and this is one of those great big, enormous "buts" which warn of a real shocker on the way) "...but at some stage you're going to have to come to a political solution as well as a security solution.

"And that means you need the ability to talk.

"If I was in government now I would want to have been talking to Hamas, I would be wanting to communicate with the Taliban and I would want to find a channel to al-Qaeda."

Mr Powell's suggestion was, of course, dismissed by the Foreign Office. A spokesman there told The Guardian: "It is inconceivable that Her Majesty's government would ever seek to reach a mutually acceptable accommodation with a terrorist organisation like al-Qaeda."

I remember a much younger Jonathan Powell as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington DC, in the days when it was "inconceivable" that we would negotiate directly with the Provisional IRA and buy 'peace' at the price of national surrender and the mass release of hundreds of terrorist criminals.

In those days, the Washington Embassy was just beginning to grasp that Bill Clinton had decided to grind Britain's face in the mud, in pursuit of Irish American votes and to pay a large political debt.

This amazing moment in the non-existent 'special relationship' is described by that superb journalist, Conor O' Clery of the Irish Times, in his book 'The Greening of the White House', a neglected classic on real politics.

Clinton had made big promises in return for the backing of rich, respectable Irish America. He had also needed Roman Catholic working class votes - lost to the Republicans in the Reagan era, mainly over the issue of abortion. This was a way of getting quite a lot of them back.

He had pocketed the money and the votes, but he had forgotten the promises. But Irish America had not, and in early 1994 they came to collect.

Clinton knew he would need them again, if he wanted to be sure of re-election in 1996. So he listened, attentively, to what they had to say. The Cold War was over. Britain was suddenly far less important as a European ally. Clinton preferred Germany anyway.

And so the long saga began, of the granting of visas to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, and of the political laundering of the Provisional IRA into a respectable 'partner in the peace process'.

And the pressure, ever-growing, from the US on Britain, to give in - a procedure in which we were treated, and regarded, much as if we were some slum state like Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia.

In fact, I remember a senior official of the Clinton White House, in a shocking phone call, pretty much comparing their intervention in Ulster with their intervention in Yugoslavia.

When I pointed out that we were a long-standing major ally and a free, sovereign, nation ruled according to law, she (sort of) realised what she had said. But she didn't withdraw it.

At that time, Jonathan Powell was as macho as could be on the subject of the IRA. He and the rest of Britain's envoys to Washington simply couldn't conceive how completely they had been kippered by Clinton - and by Adams.

The tiny Irish Embassy was far better (and earlier) informed about Clinton's plans and policies than our vast and grandiose mission on Massachusetts Avenue, which was repeatedly taken by surprise, and had to swallow its protests when it realised they would be useless.

A wonderfully futile and ill-tempered meeting between Bill Clinton and John Major took place during this sour period. I am sure pictures still exist of the wretched Mr Major going through the motions of being Bill's best friend.

I seem to remember the high point was a visit to Pittsburgh, to explore some rather tenuous Major ancestral connections. At least there wasn't a military band in fancy dress and a 21-gun salute on the White House lawn, the usual fate of unwanted and insignificant foreign leaders in Washington.

Perhaps this experience of total national humiliation and duplicity may have something to do with Mr Powell's interesting burst of candour.

Even back in 1992, Britain had been using back-channels to the IRA, opened as long as 20 years before with the famous failed meeting between the IRA leadership and William Whitelaw, in Paul Channon's Chelsea flat, on 7th July 1972 (and what were British ministers saying about the IRA on the record then, do you think?) .

The defeatist heart of the establishment had concluded years before (some as far back as 1920) that Northern Ireland would eventually be handed over to Dublin rule, if only the annoying Protestants could be somehow squared or bypassed.

Now, it's my view, and has been all the way through, that talking to Sinn Fein was a disgrace and a disaster. This is nothing to do with any views I might have about Irish nationalism. Sinn Fein was not, and is not, the only Irish patriotic tradition. On the contrary.

There were far better people with whom we might have reached a civilised arrangement, and so marginalised the IRA. But by going over the heads of law-abiding men, we effectively destroyed lawful, peaceful nationalism in Northern Ireland, and let the decent people of the SDLP know that their responsible behaviour was of no interest to us.

Violence, murder and terror were to be rewarded. Civilised behaviour was to be punished.

A similar message was sent to fair-minded, non-violent Ulster Protestants.

I have always thought it particularly foul that the grisly, Uriah Heeps and bloodstained gargoyles of the 'Loyalist' murder gangs were also rewarded for their savagery - whereas that very decent, constitutional and non-sectarian Unionist Bob McCartney was treated as a pariah.

I still remember the late Marjorie Mowlam - a Minister of the Crown - visiting 'Loyalist' gangsters in jail, to appease them, a horrible national shame.

Those of you who are preparing to write in accusing me of being an Orange order loyalist and hater of Roman Catholics, and perhaps a former Auxiliary or Black and Tan should please note the words above.

It is terrorism I oppose and despise, whoever does it. I do not think Britain has a good record in Ireland (oddly enough except during the period of direct rule, when most anti-Catholic discrimination was ended) and I do not think the Stormont Parliament should ever have been created.

The problem in Ireland has been for many years how to give a fair deal to both Roman Catholic and Protestant Irishmen.

Ever since then, official London has had to engage in a huge public lie, pretending that the continuing barbarities of the IRA were the work of 'dissidents' or of a fictional body called the 'Real IRA' - which, if it exists, is the first dissenting Irish Republican faction which has not been violently attacked by its supposed rivals (see the Collins -De Valera civil war, and the murderous conflict between the Provisionals and the INLA).

The result was that Unionism pretty much devoured itself.

David Trimble, compelled to endorse an agreement that must have sickened him, was popular until the reality of the surrender sank in, and the falsity of Mr Blair's unforgivable promises about violence and prisoner releases became clear.

People didn't read the actual 1998 agreement (I did) and so were shocked when it turned out that the IRA and Sinn Fein hadn't even signed it, were committed to nothing, but received huge and continuing concessions enforced by an implicit threat of a return to bombing.

Then Ian Paisley pretended (as we now know) to oppose the deal, but ended up sitting down with Martin McGuinness - and has himself been destroyed by this. He could not possibly be what he said he was, and behave in this way.

Next will come the realisation that Unionism is a dead cause, and cannot be saved, and the emigration to England or Scotland of those Protestants who can go.

All that is left for Unionism to do is to negotiate some sort of special status in the united Ireland that I expect to come about in 2016. Then the Unionists can be a minority and get EU grants to help them stage picturesque and meaningless Orange parades, advertised as an attraction by the all-Irish tourist board.

Why 2016? First because it will be the centenary of the Easter Rising, the great symbolic sacrifice of Irish Republicanism, deeply unpopular among most Irish people at the time, but transformed by the British over-reaction and the foolish executions of its leaders into a scene of national martyrdom.

Second, because by then the demographics will probably favour a vote for unification, and the formerly pro-Union Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland will have realised that their future now lies in a unified Republic.

Third, because such a vote was the ultimate purpose of the Belfast Agreement, though most of the coverage at the time failed even to mention the provision. It can,. by the way, be held every seven years until it comes up with the right answer (i.e. 'yes' to unification).

After which Northern Ireland is automatically transferred to Dublin rule, and the vote can never be held again. I am amazed that these rigged, prejudiced one-way plebiscites are thought to be a fair way of resolving anything.

I do not think this will be a specially happy outcome, not least because it will greatly strengthen Sinn Fein. SF is already the only UK political party allowed by law to raise funds abroad, a privilege it uses energetically and will make sure it keeps in any united Ireland.

It is therefore rich. It is also menacing, and after reunification it will have tremendous prestige. We can only guess at what this might lead to.

Those who are responsible for this mess, Mr Blair and Mr Powell among them, always had very little right to proclaim themselves as doughty foes of 'terror'.

It always amazed me that Mr Blair could claim with a straight face to be so militant on the subject, but in his case I suspect it was because he genuinely didn't see the connection, and probably still doesn't. Jeffrey Archer is not the only British politician with, er, a fertile imagination.

But the connection is there, and it is a very old one. Ancient readers of this site will remember a character called "Never Say Never Hopkinson", a Tory minister for the colonies in the 1950s, who declared that Britain would "never" give independence to Cyprus.

Alas, this turned out not to be the case, and he became Lord Colyton, perhaps to stop people calling him "Never Say Never Hopkinson" any more. People often make the mistake of seeing this period of imperial scuttle as part of the same process that led to our retreat in Ireland.

But in those days, Britain still struggled to cope with the fact that the loss of Singapore in 1942 meant that it would lose its whole empire in a surprisingly short time.

It was hard for Tory ministers (or even Labour ones) to admit that the whole boiling lot would have to be handed over, as quickly as possible, because we no longer had the money or the military power to keep them.

No real principle was involved, just an attempt to save face, ending in the final squalid scuttle from Zimbabwe in 1979, pretending busily that Robert Mugabe was a nice chap and a good egg.

The conflict over Ireland was an entirely different thing, deeply connected with the EU's takeover of the European continent and its need to divide and subdue the power that had for centuries prevented the continent falling under a single ruler.

Politically, it is part of the same process as the takeover of our laws by a foreign authority and a foreign court, our stealthy partition into regions and devolved 'nations' in Scotland and Wales (which will be vassals of Brussels, far less independent than they were before,when this is over).

It was also a very definitely a matter of principle, of not giving in to armed, criminal blackmail. So it is not surprising that both Labour and Tory parties enthusiastically supported this cave-in, and portrayed it as a wonder and a triumph.

And the question of supporting Israel's continued existence was, and is, a matter of the Western world's willingness to stand up for itself and - again - not to give in to armed blackmail.

Well, those who talk loudest of how they are resisting 'appeasement' and of 'wars against terror' and of 'standing firm' and even of 'Islamo-Fascism' are also those who claim, absurdly, that George W.Bush's concessions, and attempts at talks with Arafat, and his 'road map' , had nothing to with the 11th September massacre.

They would have done much more to force Israel into concessions, if it had not been for the cunning of Ariel Sharon, who quickly declared that Israel's 'war on terror' was identical to America's.

If the war in Iraq had been the triumph they hoped for, one of its results would have been a peace conference (similar to the one in Madrid after the first Gulf War) at which Israel would have been hustled to the table and compelled to make yet more lasting and real territorial concessions, in return for yet more temporary, unreliable paper concessions and promises.

In which case it would be a good deal more obvious what was going on. But wait around. It will become clearer, especially when the memoirs start to come out.

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15 March 2008 10:39 PM

The people who destroyed Britain now say they want to revive something called “Britishness”.

This is as grimly funny as a gangster funeral, where the murderers pile enormous wreaths on the coffin of the man they butchered.

It also completely misses the point. “Britishness” grew out of our forgotten talent for leaving each other alone, for private life and private pursuits – and a general resistance to being organised, plus a dislike for what used to be called Nosey Parkers.

How can this flourish in an age when the taxman can force entry to our homes on the say-so of some unaccountable official?

Our ancient culture was a forest that took a thousand years to grow and less than half a century to cut down. Now that the trees are all flattened, the people who massacred them find that they are shivering in a howling wilderness that they are powerless to restore to its former shape.

All the funny money “private finance initiatives” in the world, all the taxes they can raise, all the concrete and plastic they can buy, cannot rebuild a forest.

This is why nothing that they do works. The old mechanisms of loyalty and respect for authority – which these revolutionaries despised – are broken. They can shout all kinds of instructions at us, but nobody is really paying attention to anything they say.

They decree better schools and hospitals, and produce sinks of infection and ignorance, because they have destroyed conscientiousness and dutifulness, and sabotaged obedience.

They decree an end to “anti-social behaviour” but the loping packs of feral youths pay no attention, and carry on kicking people's heads as if they were footballs.

Is this any surprise in a country whose leading minds have devoted the past half-century to dismantling absolute morality, the married family and the idea of punishment?

They claim to be concerned about the planet – in the abstract.

But in reality they preside over the gross, foul-smelling uglification of a country that was, within living memory, one of the most beautiful on Earth.

They claim to be concerned about the break-up of the United Kingdom, a break-up they pursued with vigour when it suited them.

Now they drivel on about a “national day” and an “Oath of Allegiance”, pilfering their ideas from the USA, a country they understand even less than they understand their own.

Imagine it, sullen 18-year-olds, clutching diplomas they can't read after years confined in schools which they hate and which hate them, grudgingly muttering some semi-literate, politically corrected formula as they stand in front of a Union Flag made meaningless by our national surrender to the EU, by our other surrender to the IRA and by our appeasement of tiny-minded separatists in Edinburgh and Cardiff.

The day that happens, we will know, finally and for certain, that Britain is dead.____________________________

Shoeless and beltless, we shuffle into slavery

One of these days I will turn up for a flight clad only in my swimming trunks, having sent all my possessions on ahead.

I can think of no other way of speeding up the ridiculous, humiliating procedure we endure at airports. But would I be arrested for making fun of the War on Terror?

Every time I fly, I am compelled to take more and more of my clothes off – first the jacket, then the belt, then the shoes, next, no doubt, the shirt, before long, I expect, the trousers.

Why not the lot? I believe they have a machine at Heathrow that allows “security” staff to see through your clothes.

You cannot even complain. At the humorously named George Bush Airport in Houston, Texas, last week, I was hectored – as I shuffled, shoeless and beltless, towards a metal detector – by loudspeaker announcements warning me that I could be arrested for making jokes about security.

In Britain they just arrest you, not bothering with the warnings.

The illogical, futile procedures we endure were originally designed to reassure us. Now they are there to frighten us into passive acceptance of the power of the mighty State which presumes that we are all guilty.

Millions of respectable, law-abiding people regularly allow themselves to be treated only slightly better than newly convicted criminals, in return for the privilege of flying in an aircraft. And we put up with it.

And every time we put up with it we turn slowly from free men into slaves, getting used to a society in which we obey the daftest instructions because of an exaggerated fear.

So that when, in time, we become a police state in all but name, we will be so used to doing what we are told – and not daring to laugh at the stupidity of authority – that we will quietly submit to our own enslavement, and reserve our anger for the annoying minority who make a fuss.____________________________

The side of Cameron we should never see

The TV pictures of David Cameron and his son Ivan are very moving. But I wish they had not been shown, and so will Mr Cameron, one day.

This sort of thing is incredibly private, especially the intensity of emotion that any father with such a severely disabled child must feel. Why display it on national TV?

And if Mr Cameron really believes that his family is the most important thing in his life, then why seek to be Prime Minister, a job that makes normal family life quite impossible?

____________________________

Even if I were an atheist I think I would now feel it my duty to start believing in God because so many nasty, stupid people seem determined to stamp God out.

The National Association of Local Councils claims that prayers, held before council meetings in Bideford since 1573, should be scrapped, allegedly in case they breach the Human Rights and Race Relations Acts.

I don't think these laws actually have anything to say about the subject. I just think some hateful bureaucrat is using them as an excuse. Why do such people loathe religion?

I believe it is because they think so highly of themselves that they wish to play at being gods, and don't like being reminded that they are not as good or as important as they think they are – and that they and their actions will not endure.

____________________________

The “Sentencing Guidelines Council” says we should be nice to brutal thieves who steal to pay for drugs.

Why do these dim people make excuses for these wilful, self-destructive criminals?

They are not “desperate”. They are just wrongdoers who commit crimes to pay for a criminal habit that they indulge in because they enjoy it.

In a country that spends every penny of its income tax on welfare, nobody but nobody is so “desperate” that they need to prey on a fellow human.

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11 March 2008 4:28 PM

I shall be away from the office this week and so will stick to responses and ripostes in current debates on this weblog.

First, 'Grant' is only the latest to suggest that my criticisms of David Cameron are personal. No, they're political.

Mr Cameron and I are reasonably civil to each other when we meet - though he has called me a 'maniac' at a Tory gathering in an Oxfordshire church, and bellowed sarcastically at me as our bikes whizzed past each other in Kensington Gardens (his exact words were "Very fair programme!" a response to my Channel Four study of him. Alas, there wasn't time to stop and point out that a) it wasn't meant to be fair and b) he turned down my repeated requests for an interview).

I suspect that if he were not leader of the Tory Party we would get on just fine, if we ever had any reason to meet.

For my lower-upper-middle-class, suburban, minor public school background is probably about as remote from his Etonian, Bullingdon milieu as it's possible to get.

Our class system builds its highest barriers not between aristocracy and farmworker, who tend to get on quite well, or even between businessman and wageslave, who barely meet, but between different, but close, grades of the middle class, who snub and mock each other mercilessly.

On that, 'Grant' may perhaps have something, though not very much.

I think the Etonian view of politics, in which they regard themselves as entitled to govern, and willing to do practically anything for office, has a lot to do with the bottomless cynicism of the Cameroon project.

The Tory Party would guillotine the Queen and give Gibraltar to Spain, if they thought it would get them into office. If not, they wouldn't.

They wouldn't expect any hard feelings either way. Look at the way they betrayed Zimbabwe into the hands of Robert Mugabe, and the way they abandoned the House of Lords.

The rest of us are bit more concerned about the country.

Anthony Blair, whom I knew slightly before he was famous, was much more at my sort of level, which (I must admit) is one of the many reasons I found it so hilariously absurd when he became leader of the Labour Party and worrying when he became Prime Minister.

He's virtually impossible to dislike, but easy to scorn.

The person styling himself (or herself) 'Matron' chides me for suggesting that Boris Johnson is a Blairite. Well, I didn't exactly do that.

I pointed out that Mr Johnson is now attracting the sort-of support of Blairite journalists.

This takes the form of fierce attacks on Mr Livingstone from normally left-wing directions, where he would once have been safe.

Does this make Boris a Blairite? No not exactly. But... while Boris is now a powerful brand on his own, he is also a Tory MP who loyally serves under David Cameron, he will be standing for the London mayoralty as a Conservative, his election would greatly benefit Mr Cameron, and I suspect the intensifying attacks on Ken Livingstone from leftish journalists would not have been possible without Mr Cameron's transformation of his Tory party into a fully socially liberal grouping.

Now, can 'Matron' go and tell the Home Secretary who she is? She says she's having trouble proving her identity.

I thought there were many interesting comments on Jacqueline Wilson, who seems to me to be one of the most important authors writing today, immensely influential and far too little known about by parents.

I was glad that an entry on a cultural issue got a decent response.

By the way, could Ann Marie Varnam please write to me? I would be very interested in discussing this further.

The reaction to the short piece on Gaza was disappointing. I am, as I think is fairly well known, a strong supporter of Israel's right to exist and a sceptic of much of the Palestinian propaganda. And I thought I had been pretty critical of the Israeli government.

But 'Grant', yes him again, was more interested in name-calling than in discussion.

The only hope in this conflict is compromise. Israel has been repeatedly willing to do so. The Arab side (not necessarily the Arab people, who have little say in the matter) hasn't.

However much one may wish to say that both sides have done dreadful wrongs, and they have, this is the crucial difference between the two. And the continued efforts, by the USA and the EU to split the difference and engineer futile 'land-for-peace' swaps, only encourage the Arabs who see each Israeli 'compromise' as a step towards their unaltered objective, the end of Israel.

A firm insistence by the major powers that Israel was here to stay, that there would be no more 'land for peace' (or 'appeasement' as it was known when Neville Chamberlain did it) and the refugee problem needed to be solved for good, might just persuade the Arabs that they needed to compromise too.

Not much hope of that, but are there any better options?

Guy Reid Brown is a bit confused about the Golan Heights, which were taken by Israel (in one of the most astonishing military operations of modern times) in 1967, and are now under Israeli control.

Syria does not nowadays permit attacks on Israel from its own territory, fearing retaliation. But Arabs have continued to lob rockets across the Lebanese border, not far away.

No government is really responsible for Southern Lebanon, so retaliation is harder (as Israel found in its war with Hezbollah).

Penny Russell says "The Arabs were not expelled from the newly created Israel - rather, they were exhorted to leave by the surrounding Arab countries preparatory to the latter's first war against Israel. Blackmail might be a better term since it was clear that the victorious aggressors would have little time for any recalcitrants."

This was for many years the official Israeli line, but Israel's own revisionist historians have now exploded it as false, and I really don't think there is any doubt of that. And there is no excusing, or covering up the massacre at Deir Yassin (or the use of terror against Britain by the Stern Gang) .

I think the radio broadcasts probably were made as well (though it's hard to get chapter and verse), and it's plain that in some areas, notably Haifa and Nazareth, local Israelis actively encouraged their Arab neighbours to stay.

Even so, many Arabs were undoubtedly driven from their homes by Israeli action, and it is important that Israel and its supporters recognise this truth.

"From Time Immemorial" is an interesting book, though it has been vigorously attacked by pro-Arab historians and parts of it seem a bit wobbly to me.

Also interesting is Samuel Katz's 'Battleground', which presents an account of the dispute quite different from the generally-accepted one.

But these should in my view be read alongside equally partisan accounts from the Arab side.

Which brings me neatly to the dispute about teaching British history.

Yes, of course I think British children should be taught the history of their country in such a way as to make them proud of the good things about it.

In the same way I think they should teach Christianity as a faith to be followed, not as a curiosity to be studied alongside Buddhism and Islam.

The interesting thing, for me, is that anyone should think this was wrong.

Jeff Pollitt (2nd March, 11.57 a.m.) said "Peter, you seem to be suggesting that we teach our children less than the full truth when it comes to history, in order for them to be patriotic. Would this not be teaching patriotism on a false premise?"

To which I reply, that, yes, that is what I am suggesting, and it would not be on a false premise.

It would be impossible to teach them the 'full truth' anyway, since it is so vast, accounts are contentious, even over the battle of Bosworth and the Glorious Revolution - and school history has to be enormously selective.

On what grounds should it select?

To denigrate and dispirit? To confuse and leave fundamentally ignorant? Or to instil knowledge of and pride in the immense achievements of their forebears, which they will inherit and must hand on to their own children, within a coherent narrative?

I have no difficulty about this.

It is true that this country is the birthplace of freedom under the law, of religious and political tolerance, of a rich and majestic culture, which I am proud to have inherited.

It is also true that this has allowed it to be at the forefront of scientific development, to have the world's first modern economy and - armed with all these things - to defeat - with astonishing valour - many tyrannies, at home and abroad, which threatened the human spirit with endless repression and enslavement.

Once they have learned that, and are confident in it, then they can discover the rest, and see it in proportion and in its proper context.

I don't think we should pretend that there were no bad things in our past ( my school histories certainly did not do so) or that all foreign countries are inferior (I wasn't taught that either).

Finally, the gallows.

I did try to write a second response to the tortuous, immensely long pleadings of 'David' about the death penalty, but gave up when I found I was repeating what I had already said several times, because he was going round and round in ever-small circles.

Of course there are practical differences between armies killing enemies and executioners killing condemned men. But they are practical, not moral.

For moral purposes, this is a distinction without a difference. All but pacifists accept that the state has the lawful right to kill.

The only argument that remains is the precise circumstance. And if one had to argue between the two, the execution of a murderer convicted after due process would surely be morally preferable to the killing, without any due process, of a kindly family man conscripted into a foreign army or air force against his will.

As for his concentration on the alleged 'defencelessness' of the condemned man, I am afraid I just lost sympathy with this.

He is defended, from birth to death, by the law against arbitrary power and unjust death.

The law would punish (quite possibly with death) anyone who sought to substitute revenge for justice.

His main defence, in a lawful society, was to remain within the law.

By deliberately killing a fellow creature with malice aforethought, he consciously and deliberately threw that defence away.

In a lawless society, of course, there is no such defence. The murderer would die (or not die) in a shoot-out with police. Or somebody else might die in that shoot-out. Or a police officer, or an innocent bystander, might be killed or maimed for life.

If 'David' really thinks that morally superior to execution after due process, we inhabit different moral universes. But I think he is just making excuses.

He doesn't like capital punishment because that is the fashionable position. But he cannot come up with a decent argument against it, and nor can anyone else.

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08 March 2008 7:23 PM

The alleged Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, says she needs to be able to prove who she is. I agree it's a problem. It is hard to credit that this deeply unimpressive person holds the great office once occupied by Winston Churchill.

I expect she gets stopped by doubting "security" men quite often. I personally have trouble believing that she exists at all, or that this country should in general be run by witless wastes of space in thrall to all the stupidest ideas of the Sixties.

But Ms Smith's identity difficulty – sad as it is – is no excuse for forcing the rest of us to be fingerprinted.

She says we "need" to "prove who we are". But mainly we need to do this because the Government has spun a spider's web of silly rules, which snags the law-abiding and spares real troublemakers.

Just in case you are a Mafia money-launderer, you must show a passport to change currency, or produce a gas bill to open a bank account.

Just in case you are a child-molester, you must have your entire biography checked by police before you can work in all kinds of places.

Just in case you are a terrorist, you are barred from entering an increasing number of buildings, or from flying, unless you can produce a piece of plastic which supposedly says who you are.

Very soon, under section 14 of the Police and Justice Act 2006, the State will have the power to demand an identity document from anybody who wants to board the Isle of Wight ferry.

And I predict here that a photo-identity will, before long, be required to buy a long-distance rail or bus ticket, to stay in a hotel, to use a credit card or to buy a TV set or mobile phone.

These precautions are useless against real money-launderers, paedophiles, gangsters and terrorists, who laugh at them.

But they make people like Ms Smith look and feel as if they are doing something.

Worse, they fool the gullible into thinking they are safer from crime and terror. Believe me, even if you've nothing to hide, you've something to fear.

And so they plough on with their "ID" cards, never admitting that the real purpose of these breathing licences is to increase the Government's power to meddle in our private lives.

Many of you have helped me in my campaign against this unBritish scheme. And we have, in fact, won a small victory.

Ms Smith has now put off plans to force us to be fingerprinted when we renew our passports, probably until 2012.

Originally, this was meant to have started by now, but thousands of people renewed their passports early – to avoid being fingerprinted and to protest – and this has plainly frightened the Home Office. We can still beat this grotesque plan.

____________________________

The day soccer hit a moronic new low

Why do respectable, educated people have anything to do with the moronic cult of football, a celebration of cheating, shamming, spite, crudity and greed?

Intelligence and thought seem to shrivel within a mile of any soccer field.

How could a thinking human have wanted to show public sympathy for a convicted criminal whose victim had been left partially blind?

Well, exactly, but Tim Cahill did just that. His later apology was couched in the worthless "I'm sorry if ..." mode, which effectively blames the witnesses of this loathsome gesture for being upset by it.____________________________

Yobs jeer and the RAF just cringes

As a society, we have no guts and we will not defend ourselves when attacked. That is the simple message from the official RAF ban on wearing uniform in Peterborough.

The first instinct of the authorities is to cringe, probably afraid of being called "racist" or something similar if they stood up for themselves.

In any proper country, the people who jeered at the servicemen would be the ones hiding themselves in shame. But not here.

That's why – short of a political earthquake – we're done, gone and finished, and will cease to exist as a nation within a generation or two. It's also why those who can are getting out.

Remember this old, hard truth. If you don't respect your own Armed Forces, you will fairly soon find that you have to respect someone else's.

____________________________

Goodbye and good riddance to the useless blasphemy law

I am glad to see the back of the blasphemy laws. They were no use at protecting the Christian religion and gave some Muslim countries an excuse to apply much fiercer pro-Islam laws against Christians, as Christians in Pakistan have told me.

We cannot complain about Muslim attempts to censor criticism of Islam if we have such laws.

My own suspicion is that those, especially self-proclaimed "artists", who seek to make money through sacrilege will come to be ashamed of themselves, sooner or later. Meanwhile, cold contempt will hurt them much more than prosecution.

____________________________

The Tories and a shameless Euro lie

At last the fake row about a referendum on the EU Constitution is over, and we will stop having to listen to the Tory Party's phoney cries of rage about a treaty it would have signed without fuss had it been in office.

The Conservative pretence of hostility to the EU is one of the most shameless lies in politics. They have always been the most EU-friendly party, and adopted meaningless "Euro-scepticism" only when people realised what the EU really meant.

This is completely false. In effect, most drugs are now legal in Britain.

It tells you how bad things have got when the global headquarters of flabby liberalism, the United Nations, attacks this country for the way celebrity drug-users are glamorised and indulged by the law and the media. But the UN is right for once.____________________________

Let's have an architectural crimes tribunal at which leading modern architects are condemned to dwell in their own hideous, stupid structures.

The really serious cases could be compelled to blow up their own monstrosities in front of jubilant crowds of former occupants.

These ridiculous people have done nearly as much damage to British civilisation since the Sixties as have politicians.

One of the silliest is Sir Richard Rogers, who is now trying to stop the demolition of a prison for the poor, liltingly named "Robin Hood Gardens" but in fact a stark, inhuman block of misery that would look too brutal in North Korea.

He says it's as beautiful as a Georgian terrace. You have to ask, not least after seeing what he has designed, just how long it's been since this character last had his eyes tested.

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04 March 2008 5:08 PM

I don't much like the works of Jacqueline Wilson, the author who writes about the miserable social-worker infested world inhabited by all too many British young people. I don't like them because I suspect that Dame Jacqueline is a truthful observer of modern British society, and that the pitiful life of her character Tracy Beaker is all too typical of reality. The popularity of these books suggests that this is so.

So I think Dame Jacqueline deserves a lot of credit for saying that she doesn't actually approve of the way most young people are now brought up. She thinks that they should have less freedom, and that their parents should stop trying to be popular with them, and should say 'no' a lot more often.I don't think her stance will do her much good with the reviewers, teachers and librarians and leftish bookshop managers who have helped her to her current fame and wealth. And these people have immense influence on what books people buy and read. Who do you think decides what gets reviewed, or displayed in the shop window, given special prominence in the library and put on the official reading lists?

Here's part of what she said:"Parents need to take a stand, to tell their children 'I don't care if everyone else in the class is allowed to do this or that. You are not."....basically, many teenagers want to be told 'No, I'm not allowing you to go there.'It comes as a relief to them and then they can moan and groan to their friends."

Well, exactly. Very few people want or like a world without rules, even though that is what a lot of them have - especially if they end up 'in care' . But even outside 'care' 'homes', where the social workers in charge are virtually powerless, and their young inmates can end up on drugs, or as prostitutes, it is very hard for any adult to exercise authority of this kind.

So many children now do not really have 'parents' in the traditional sense, but only one parent, or a Ping-Pong arrangement between two rival homes. Fathers in these circumstances have their authority gravely weakened , while mothers on their own are bound to have a specially tough time dealing with teenage boys.

Teachers, parents and all adults know that there is now a major legal risk if they dare to intervene actively to stop a child or teenager doing something they think is wrong. And the law has given the troublesome teen the power to make allegations of 'abuse' which, however far-fetched, must be taken seriously by the law, and can easily ruin the lives of those falsely accused.

In fact, there is a serious scandal in this country now, almost impossible to investigate or uncover, in which people take advantage of our current obsession with abuse, and of the special rules for dealing with rape charges, which both more or less presume guilt, to take revenge on or gain advantage over someone who stands in their way in a property dispute or a custody dispute, or who is making their life difficult at school. . Some of the letters I receive from people in prison are deeply alarming, hinting as they do at a growing number of such false allegations. I know people sometimes pretend they are innocent when they are not, but even so, the conduct of many of these cases is wholly unfair.

There's also the way that the law, which officially frowns on under-age sex, actually operates so as to help young girls defy the responsible adults in their lives, and shack up with boyfriends. Police will refuse to act unless the girl herself complains, which of course she doesn't. I know this because people write to me about it privately. The cases tend to get heard, if at all, in closed court sessions.

So I hope that Dame Jacqueline will follow her encouraging remarks with a work of fiction in which she describes what happens to wise and thoughtful adults who try their best to keep a teenage girl safe from our moral wilderness, and end up defeated - and in deep trouble - for doing so...

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And once again, no doubt, these poor deluded souls will continue to say 'Yes, it's terrible, the man's virtually a Marxist, but we've got to get Labour out, so what can we do? ' To which I reply, in what way would you be getting Labour out, by putting the Tories in? You might as well call in Dyno-Rod to get your blockage out, and then pay them to put it back in again, only perfumed with forest pine scent, or perhaps lavender. Mr Cameron is in many ways to the Left of Labour.

This is certainly the case with his new pledge to give one third of his front-bench jobs to women, if he become Prime Minister.This actually means that , in the remote event of the Tories winning the next election, every single female Tory MP would be guaranteed a ministerial post, regardless of talent or experience. Even New Labour has never quite gone this far, and I'm not sure it would even be legal for the Tories to do so.

It is automatically left-wing and anti-family to promise this. Women in politics do not represent all other women. They represent women like themselves, the ones who believe that a career outside the home is morally preferable to raising your own children. Let us not even argue whether they are right about this. I have done so often enough elsewhere. Let us simply accept that, by making the choice of office career over full-time motherhood, these women have expressed a political preference.

So, not only will they fail to speak for those women who choose to remain at home, or women who would very much like to stay at home with their young if only they could afford to - a large and growing number. They will be actively unhelpful to their case. After all, taxing one-income homes to provide day-orphanages for the children of two-income homes is contentious. And this policy is always favoured by these self-styled 'working women', who cannot grasp that those who remain at home also work, and that many who go out to work would much rather not, but are compelled by need to do so.

A (married) male MP with a wife who does remain at home, trying to make a go of it on one income, will be a much better representative for a full-time mother than one of these suited wageslave militants.

Mr Cameron and his circle have absolutely no clue about the existence of such people. In Mr Cameron's world, every house is equipped with a trained live-in nanny just as it is equipped with water, gas and electricity. I doubt if it crosses his mind to consider just how many women hate being torn from their tiny children each morning by the demands of work and the need for two salaries to pay the enormous taxes demanded by our out-of-control welfare system.

More, it is quite clearly nothing to do with a reasonable desire for rational equality of the sexes. That requires the law, and the customs of the country, to do everything possible to ensure that women are not debarred from any chosen career solely because of their sex. But to guarantee a woman a position of power purely because she is a woman, and virtually irrespective of her qualifications, is the reverse of this. It is irrational discrimination against men, and it is propaganda.

What Mr Cameron's remaining apologists are going to have to grasp is that their hero means what he says. He is not secretly planning to announce some sort of right-wing coup after he has been elected on a soppy ticket. He plans to campaign as Blue Labour, and to govern as Blue Labour. He really is the heir to Blair. He really does like Britain as it is, after 10 years of New Labour. He is saying, as clearly as he can, that a Cameron government would be a return to Blair - which is one of the reasons why Cameron Toryism is picking up so many helpers and supporters from the media Left, who prefer him to the unfashionable, non-metropolitan Gordon Brown, and feel safer with him. Something similar, I think, is happening in the London mayoral election, where Boris Johnson is enjoying a curious vogue with one-time Blairites.

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Israel's latest assault on Gaza, in which innocents predictably died and Israel's reputation was predictably wounded yet again, is rather typical of that country's current inadequate government. It is given to showy but ultimately worthless violent responses to provocation, like the counter-productive Lebanon war. This will not stop rockets landing on Israel, and Ehud Olmert knows it.

It is now some years since Ariel Sharon forced the Israeli settlers out of Gaza and handed it over to Palestinian control. Nobody can be sure what this cunning, bloodstained old monster was up to when he did this - some believed that the West Bank was next , and that only Sharon's stroke prevented him from astonishing the world by pulling out of that too.

I doubt it. But he might well have pulled out of large chunks of the disputed territories. By the way, I call them that because their ownership is much more complex than most people believe. There wasn't ever an independent Arab State called 'Palestine', as some seem to think. This parcel of territory was the site of one of the last imperial land-grabs in modern history. There were no independent countries in what is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria before 1917. The whole area was part of the slovenly, decaying Ottoman Empire whose administrative borders bore no relation to anything now in existence. Jews and Arabs (many of the Arabs being Christian) had lived there under Ottoman rule since time immemorial.

The whole of British Mandate Palestine, originally including the Golan Heights and all of what is now Jordan was once officially open to Jewish settlement. Then the Golan was given to the French ( who later passed it on to independent Syria) and the land East of the Jordan was given to the Emirate of TransJordan, and incidentally closed to Jews, as it still is. The story of how this came about is most interesting and little-known, and involves shifty British manoeuvring in Syria and Iraq. I urge you to see if you can find out what happened, since it is left out of many accounts of the dispute and is in some ways quite funny, though the outcome has been tragic enough to stifle the laughter.My experience is that almost everybody has strong opinions on the Israel dispute, but hardly anybody has any clue about how it came to pass.

The 'West Bank' and Gaza were then seized (illegally) by Arab armies in 1948, in their war to prevent the establishment of Israel, following the Arab rejection of the 1947 United Nations partition plan. Britain was one of very few countries which recognised the annexation of the West Bank by TransJordan (which then quite reasonably became 'Jordan'). It was this annexed territory that Israel conquered in 1967. So who really has the right to govern this land? I mention this only to make clear that it is more complicated than the BBC and the other pro-Arab news organisations tend to make out. If it were as simple as they say, there could be a solution tomorrow. Alas, it isn't, and there won't be.

But back to Gaza. Gaza now has, technically, what its inhabitants are supposed to want - independence from Israel. But this has not in any way changed the fact that the main political purpose of the main political movement in Gaza is - the destruction of Israel by demoralisation, and by taking away its international reputation and legitimacy, a process well advanced. Hence the constant rocket attacks on Israel, launched from Gaza. The rocketeers are positively hoping to madden the Israelis into retaliation.

And I think I can guarantee to you that, if Israel tomorrow withdrew from all, or most of the disputed territories, leaving them entirely self-governing - and even if it somehow provided a secure communication (which many West Bank Arabs, far from keen on their compatriots in Gaza, wouldn't want) between the territories and Gaza, there would be the same response. Rockets would be launched, week in, week out, night and day, from the territories into Israel. Get a map and you will see that this would mean most of the urban populated areas of Israel, including its only major airport, would be within range of such attack. It is hard to see how that could be sustained for long.

This is not some complaint against Palestinian ingratitude etc. The Palestinian Arabs have absolutely nothing to be grateful for, from anyone. The Palestinian Arabs for the most part are like everyone else in the world, decent people caught up in a quarrel they cannot control, who long for peace just as any other normal person does. But, long for it as they may, they do not live in freedom (which is why the banners calling for a 'Free Palestine' are such a joke. Life under the rule of Fatah or Hamas is not free or ever likely to be. The Palestinian Authority was being criticised for malpractice by Amnesty International before it ever became a state, a unique achievement). Dissent against Fatah or Hamas is very bad for your health. However much you might want the fighting to stop, it would be deadly dangerous to protest against the use of your rooftop or your courtyard to fire a Kassam rocket at Sderot.

The Palestinians live in squalor, six decades after their wrongful expulsion from Israel, because their squalor is good propaganda for the Arab cause - do you really think that the Arab Muslim world, with all its oil wealth, could not in the last 60 years have afforded to rehouse the refugees like princes if it had wanted to? It has preferred war, on principle. It does not believe that a Jewish state should exist on what it regards as Arab, Muslim land. Jews are welcome to live there as second-class citizens ( as they did before the Ottomans fell). But they are not welcome to run a state, however small, or (above all) control its borders and permit Jewish immigration.

Palestinian Nationalism is a strange thing. Its spokesmen say endlessly they want a state, but do they really, except possibly for an interim period? My guess is that, if Israel ceased to exist the whole area would rapidly be absorbed into a 'Greater Syria' probably run from Damascus. Yasser Arafat himself declared that he did not want to be 'Mayor of Jericho' - by which he meant that - as the embattled leader of a great Arab cause he was a big, powerful and important man, but if he got his supposed objective and became chief of a tiny, barely viable Palestinian nation he would just be the insignificant leader of a powerless, impoverished new nation. The purpose of the Arab political movement in both Gaza and the disputed territories is not the establishment of a Palestinian State alongside Israel. It is the demoralisation, discrediting and at length the abolition of the Jewish State.

Giving up Gaza, it seems to me, has showed that beyond all doubt. Until the latest foolish incursion by the dim Mr Olmert, there hasn't been an Israeli soldier or settler in Gaza for years. Yet the continuing purpose of the Hamas-run Arab authorities in Gaza has been to keep alive the conflict with Israel (and to a lesser extent with their Fatah rivals in Ramallah). Here was an opportunity to build, with aid from the outside world, a peaceful, orderly and eventually prosperous city-state on the sea, an example of what Arabs could do in the region given the chance. But, as always in this story, the 'struggle' against Israel was more important to those in charge. Grasp that, and you will see why this and every other concession of 'Land for Peace' leads nowhere. I see no reason for any hope at all in this beautiful, sad region.